Software applications in the telecommunications industry require intensive and rigorous testing. Applications approaching final release may be tested in many combinations of hardware and software configurations and simulated user environments. The applications may provide telecommunications functions such as providing two-way voice communications, data communications, three-way calling, and others. The applications may provide telecommunications support or management functions. For example, the applications may promote provisioning or adding a new mobile phone to a subscriber account and bringing the mobile phone into service. The applications may promote monitoring a load on a network node such as a router, a local exchange switch, or a mobile switching center. To test new hardware and/or software configurations that provide telecommunications functions, test calls may be made from an originating device, for example a mobile phone, to a terminating device, for example another mobile phone or a fixed phone. Alternatively, portions or nodes of a telecommunications network may be tested independently of the remainder of the network to verify just the functionality associated with that node.
In testing a mobile phone provisioning application, for example, a dummy equipment serial number (ESN) may need to be provided to complete provisioning and bringing into service the new mobile phone account. As the mobile phone provisioning application may be designed to enforce uniqueness of equipment serial numbers, a tester may be required to provide a previously unused dummy equipment serial number when testing the provisioning application. For example, to confirm that a mobile phone provisioning application supports adding at least two mobile phones to a single account, the tester may need to provision a second mobile phone on an account. If the dummy equipment serial number provided by the tester has already been used to provision another account in the test provisioning system, the test case may fail not because of lack of support for the multi-phone capability but rather because of the already used equipment serial number.
Challenges of testing telecommunications equipment and applications arise related to the typically large volume of activity that is tested and also related to the large number of different features provided by the equipment and applications. These challenges include coordination among test team members.